Abstract

Background

There appears to be an inconsistency in experimental paradigms used in fMRI research
on moral judgments. As stimuli, moral dilemmas or moral statements/ pictures that
induce emotional reactions are usually employed; a main difference between these stimuli
is the perspective of the participants reflecting first-person (moral dilemmas) or
third-person perspective (moral reactions). The present study employed functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in order to investigate the neural correlates of
moral judgments in either first- or third-person perspective.

Results

Our results indicate that different neural mechanisms appear to be involved in these
perspectives. Although conjunction analysis revealed common activation in the anterior
medial prefrontal cortex, third person-perspective elicited unique activations in
hippocampus and visual cortex. The common activation can be explained by the role
the anterior medial prefrontal cortex may play in integrating different information
types and also by its involvement in theory of mind. Our results also indicate that
the so-called "actor-observer bias" affects moral evaluation in the third-person perspective,
possibly due to the involvement of the hippocampus. We suggest two possible ways in
which the hippocampus may support the process of moral judgment: by the engagement
of episodic memory and its role in understanding the behaviors and emotions of others.

Conclusion

We posit that these findings demonstrate that first or third person perspectives in
moral cognition involve distinct neural processes, that are important to different
aspects of moral judgments. These results are important to a deepened understanding
of neural correlates of moral cognition—the so-called “first tradition” of neuroethics,
with the caveat that any results must be interpreted and employed with prudence, so
as to heed neuroethics “second tradition” that sustains the pragmatic evaluation of
outcomes, capabilities and limitations of neuroscientific techniques and technologies.